Freedom

Light at the End of the Path

Is that light I see before me? November 8, how I await you.

Amanda Rocks

Amanda at Pandagon has an amazing post about the Haggard clusterfuck. Turns out, the person responsible for Haggard's straying is none other than his wife. If she'd just been more loving, poor old Ted wouldn't have gone looking for cock and meth.

Is there nothing that Fundies will not stoop to if it keeps them from having to re-think any of their positions?

We Shall Not Be Moved (Backwards)

The Pomegranate
by Eavan Boland

The only legend I have ever loved is
the story of a daughter lost in hell.
And found and rescued there.
Love and blackmail are the gist of it.
Ceres and Persephone the names.
And the best thing about the legend is
I can enter it anywhere.  And have.

As a child in exile in
a city of fogs and strange consonants,
I read it first and at first I was
an exiled child in the crackling dusk of
the underworld, the stars blighted.  Later
I walked out in a summer twilight
searching for my daughter at bed-time.
When she came running I was ready
to make any bargain to keep her.
I carried her back past whitebeams
and wasps and honey-scented buddleias.
But I was Ceres then and I knew
winter was in store for every leaf
on every tree on that road.
Was inescapable for each one we passed.
And for me.

  It is winter
and the stars are hidden.
I climb the stairs and stand where I can see
my child asleep beside her teen magazines,
her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit.
The pomegranate!  How did I forget it?
She could have come home and been safe
and ended the story and all
our heart-broken searching but she reached
out a hand and plucked a pomegranate.
She put out her hand and pulled down
the French sound for apple and
the noise of stone and the proof
that even in the place of death,
at the heart of legend, in the midst
of rocks full of unshed tears
ready to be diamonds by the time
the story was told, a child can be
hungry.  I could warn her.  There is still a chance.
The rain is cold.  The road is flint-coloured.
The suburb has cars and cable television.
The veiled stars are above ground.
It is another world.  But what else
can a mother give her daughter but such
beautiful rifts in time?
If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.
The legend will be hers as well as mine. 
She will enter it.  As I have.
She will wake up.  She will hold
the papery flushed skin in her hand.
And to her lips.  I will say nothing.

Caliberal has been in despair about what has happened to women in this country. I love Cali; she's my girlcrush, and I wish we lived closer so I could hang out with her. But here, in my home, I have two reasons for every move I make in honor of women. Two daughters, born of my body, and the lights of my life.

Sometimes, I just want to throw up my hands and give up. We are going backwards when it comes to women's rights in this country. The Fundamentalists, whose fear of women is so pronounced that they can't think of enough ways to punish us for having vaginae, currently seem to have direct access to those in power who make decisions about women's rights.

Of course, it's the same in various parts of the world. Bob Herbert's columns this week dealt with violence against women--violence that was directed at women solely on the basis of their sex.

My friend, Amy, said it more eloquently, I think, but then again, I think poets say most everything more eloquently than those of us who write clumsy prose in offering to the Muse.

Voices
Amy Small-McKinney  

  Rwanda, Africa

Lake Kivu plaits through the Rift valley,
a current of despair and revenge.
I was the Hutus' favorite daughter,
Pauline Nyiramashuko.
I am their nation; a lakebed,
my mouth a volcano,
a danger to anything that breathes.
My nation insisted I become a nation,
scissors, opened and closed, life sliced
in two.  I sent my son, Shalom,
to young Rose, the Tutsis' plea to God,
to where she hid, to the fields
where her faith fought back.
I called to the Tutsis, exhausted as rain:
Here is your food.  Here is your shelter.
All of their death took only an hour;
a red chested cuckoo asked why.
I told him: My eyes are split open,
I am sorry; I am not.

  Bombay, India

This will never end, my wandering
into the twilight, out of my Bombay
backyard, my parents' final basket of fruit,
my peafowl sashaying to the males' courtly
help help of recognition.
I miss my peacocks more than mother or father,
birds of prey who could not comprehend
this girl's longings. 
When the males release
their plumage, they call ahhh ahhh;
the peahen mutters Hell-o  Hell-o.
I can not tell you
what you want to hear,
cannot remember the travelers' eyes, faces, words,
any kindnesses as I drifted out of my skin,
as my mouth became the rapist's chick, wingless, blind. 
This will never end.  No, I am not that girl:
her sorrow song not mine.

  Provincetown, USA

I do not wake up every morning and thank God
that I am a man; I love my mother. 
I will never tell my wife.
What I love most is morning,
my line cast for stripers,
their obedient mouths.
The girl was pretty, tall, lean enough.
In the graveyard, the headstones
shut their eyes, their mouths sang
silently, she did not hear their sympathy.
All of my life looked
meek in the setting sun.
I heard her No, but who
could stop in the throes of opening.
That was another life.

  Meerwala, Pakistan

She was never my true child.
My snow white crane,
her red right eye, her hysterical cry
entreating me, Faz Mai, to feed her.
I hear her
in the shallow waters of the Indus,
but my breasts are not milky,
the weeping sustenance that calls
my fledgling home for food
is only rain.  Even my tears
have dissolved into breaths I take
when I must breathe, have to breathe,
for the child who floated out of me
into my blister of nothing.
And for my cousin Naseem,
like me, forced to spread herself
into our country of dread,
into the fields where white bulbs
of cotton are slowly dying.

  Pennsylvania, USA 

That was another life.
I had not yet cradled my daughter,
she had not suckled
my lexicon of milk.
I had not forgiven myself
for being a body,
a dutiful daughter,
for inhaling my era's
numbing acceptance.
I refuse to remember him.
I refuse to remember the Portuguese
stones of loss, the nearby sea
smacking its futile fish.
He kissed me.
He did not kiss our child's sigh
as I slipped it into the waters
of the Holiday Inn, my thumb nail,
my lily, I named No, Please No.
At times, I want to be his body,
to feed him with regret
I need to imagine.
Now white bulbs push up and out
of my hardened suburban soil.
What I have learned is lime, water,
what returns and will not return.
Still, there are times I want to be you, 
Naseem Mai, pesticide flowing through
your still body like fresh milk.
Now I am milk. My daughter has eyes
so blue they become the sea,
daybreak, another country.

  Home

I return to the sink, the toilet, the mop, the clothes,
the little neck splayed opened, my husband's
silky undershirt, its smallest tear.

My husband snaps a picture
of our daughter shaping mud
for her report on the prairie photographer
who fell in love with sod,
the wonders of sod,
gave up everything for sod:
medical school, lovers, home,
to travel, to take pictures
that would be lost
in a fire, all 1500, except negatives,
imprinted on glass,
sheltered from obscurity
so, finally,
nothing was lost.

I love my imaginings of this man,
this Solomon Butcher,
the long stretches of land,
the wind, the occasional tree,
the lone dugout,
how he wanted to discover the world,
discover the woman, her fire
beneath the caldron.

I love my life,
my mislaid child,
this century of tears,
life before life.

This week, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on an abortion question. One of the heroines of the right-to-choose movement, Jane Hodgson died a few days ago. Dr. Hodgson was sentenced to jail in 1970 for performing an "illegal" abortion. She acted on her conscience, choosing to provide medical care to a woman who had contracted German Measles during her pregnancy. Rubella is devastating to the developing fetus. But don't think that the anti-choice forces give a shit about any of that. Every sperm, egg, and zygote is sacred. Women, on the other hand, don't count for shit in their world.

Perhaps it's best that Dr. Hodgson not live to see what continues to happen that women fought and died for just a generation ago. Eight men, none of whom will never be pregnant, never face the danger of pregnancy, never have to make a choice about what they carry within their bodies, will rule on whether women and their doctors can be trusted to make the right decision about late-term abortion.

The law lacks the exception for a pregnant woman's health that the court held in the Nebraska case to be constitutionally required; Congress simply declared that the procedure was never necessary.

Congress declared that the procedure is never necessary? Jesus Fucking Christ. Is this the same Congress that voted to authorize the president's search for chimerical weapons of mass destruction? That spent days arguing over whether Terri Schiavo was alive? What, did they all go to medical school during one of their recesses? What the fuck?

But you know what? Regardless of what the Supreme Court decides, we will fight them. We will fight them with Emergency Kindness. We will fight them with my nascent plan to create a network of women willing to help minors get Plan B. We will fight them by educating our daughters about the beauty and perfection of their own bodies, their own souls. They will not take our daughters.

For a generation, we have been losing ground. But it is time for a new generation of Bread and Roses. Of Beauty and Sex. Of Love and Pleasure. Of Equal Opportunity and Freedom.

Bread and Roses
by (Lyrics: James Oppenheim; Music: Martha Coleman or Caroline Kohlsaat) (1910s)
As we come marching, marching in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing: "Bread and roses! Bread and roses!"
As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women's children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!

As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it is bread we fight for -- but we fight for roses, too!

As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days.
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more the drudge and idler -- ten that toil where one reposes,
But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and roses! Bread and roses!

Twenty years ago, I fought my shame by posing for photos for a friends' artistic portfolio. I never thought I would post any of those photos publicly, but today, for my daughters, and for myself, and for Cali, I re-claim my body, my rights, my freedom.

It's not perfect, but it's mine. And I'll be godfuckingdamned before I let them, or anyone else, tell me what I can do with it. And if they think that they can mess with my daughters, they clearly, clearly do not know the wrath of Mom-Lorraine.

When the Enemy is the Self

Ted Haggard had a bad day yesterday. His self-loathing, his hatred of his body and its desires, desires he has stifled and twisted, caught up with him--publicly, and shamed, he resigned his position as President of the National Association of Evangelicals.

It's the kind of thing that schadenfreude is all about: watching, with glee, the suffering of one who has been hoisted by his own petard.
But, yesterday, I also had a bad day. I spent much of yesterday crying, sick to my stomach, unable to catch my breath, and contemplating the various implements within my own house that could be used to effect my own demise.

Jesus commanded that we should love all people as we love ourselves. But perhaps Ted Haggard and many, many of his compatriots do not love themselves; therefore, they cannot love others.
I get that kind of pain.

Pain has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.

It has no future but itself,
Its infinite realms contain
Its past, enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.
Emily Dickinson, XIX

My pain yesterday was precipitated by a cruel remark made by someone that struck at the very heart of me. It was a criticism of some essential part of myself. Not a valid criticism, but the kind of remark one makes when one has set out to hurt someone. It found its mark, and devastated, it took me hours to dig myself out of the hole that I had been thrown into. Of course, as anyone who has suffered from these types of events will tell you, once you get in the hole, you are quickly joined by the other monsters, and before long, one remark had become an entire critique of my useless, awful life.

I suppose I'm lucky in that I've had to deal with these types of events before. I've learned coping mechanisms--some cathartic, some merely busywork until the crisis has passed. But it was a long, horrible day. For a few hours, my self-loathing was at its zenith, and I fantasized, in exquisite detail, the various ways that if I really wanted to, I could end that pain forever and kill myself. The only thing that kept me from doing it was the memory that this has happened to me many times before, and if I could just hold on, eventually the storm would blow through me. It did. When the acute feelings had passed, I was left with the sensation of being a tree that had been violently stripped of all its leaves. Naked and exposed. My whole body ached.

Life is tough and brimming with loss, and the most we can do about it is to glimpse ourselves clear now and then, and find out what we feel about familiar scenes and recurring faces this time around.

Roger Angell Let Me Finish

One of the toughest things that depression and addiction have taught me is that my secrets will kill me if left in the dark. It does not mean that I have to equip myself with a bullhorn and proclaim my secrets to the world (although some might argue that I tend to use blogging to do such things), but rather, that when something makes itself aware to me, pushing it down into the darkness, ignoring it, is the quickest way I know to start myself on some sort of downward spiral. And so, when I feel some truth, or some urge, or some desire, I make sure to admit it to myself, and if necessary, tell someone else.

Relentless honesty can be exhausting. And as the Dalai Lama said, "Honesty without compassion is cruelty." That's the rub for me. It's all well and good to be honest, but if it merely becomes one more way to beat the shit out of myself, well, that's not the intention of honesty. Which isn't to say that I don't admit the bad about myself; it's just that if I am acknowledging some part of myself that needs improvement, I need to do so in a way that allows me to move forward in change, rather than getting stuck slung over some barrel, where I invite everyone to take a whack at my ass.
Mr. Haggard's secrets, Mr. Foley's secrets, Mr. Swaggart's secrets, Mr. Limbaugh's secrets, Mr. Bush's secrets--have not, as far as anyone can tell, made them more compassionate, self-aware human beings. Instead, they have retreated into addiction, and into projection, where their self-loathing evinces itself as cruelty to others. Pedophilia. Making fun of disability. Going to prostitutes. Sending others to war. Jesus said to love others as you love yourself. If their behaviour toward others is a reflection of their own feelings toward themselves, their inner pain must be overwhelming.
For those of you who don't know Mr. Haggard's story, here are parts of it.

The evangelical association states on its Web site that homosexual sex is condemned by Scripture, and Mr. Haggard has advocated passage of an amendment to the United States Constitution to ban same-sex marriage.

The accuser, Mike Jones, told KUSA, Channel 9, in Denver that Mr. Haggard had paid him for sex over the last three years, and that he had methamphetamine several times.
“People may look at me and think what I’ve done is immoral,” Mr. Jones, who said he is no longer a prostitute, told KUSA. “But I think I had to do the moral thing in my mind, and that is expose someone who is preaching one thing and doing the opposite behind everybody’s back.”
Mr. Haggard said in a lengthy interview with KUSA that he had never used drugs of any kind and that he did not smoke or drink alcohol.
Mr. Haggard has been a supporter of an amendment to the state’s Constitution banning same-sex marriage, on which Coloradans will vote next week. He told KUSA that the accusations might have been politically motivated.

Later, however, this came out:

Rev. Ted Haggard, Evangelical Senior Pastor of New Life Church in Colorado Springs, has confessed to some of the accusations against him according to Rev. Ross Parsley, who is serving as Acting Senior Pastor of the 14,000-member Protestant church.
Rev. Ted Haggard, a key Evangelical in the religious right and president of the National Association of Evangelicals, said in a statement that he placed himself on administrative leave "pending investigation, spiritual counsel, and a decision by the church's board of overseers" after he was accused of using drugs and participating in a three-year homosexual relationship.
After he resigned, the board of overseers met with Haggard.  "It is important for you to know that he confessed to the overseers that some of the accusations against him are true," said Parsley in an e-mail to the congregation.

Earlier in his life, Haggard saw demons. As he told the Colorado Springs Gazette:

Haggard had experienced a vision in high school after he was born again.

He said he saw demons hovering over newborn babies at a hospital, waiting to instill in them negative character traits such as hatred, greed, drug use and masturbation.
These were the kind of spirits Haggard knew he had to fight. Haggard said he never thought of leading his own church.

Masturbation as a demon? It doesn't take a genius to figure out that even as a teenager, Haggard struggled with what his flesh desired and what his brain told him he could have. What a conflict that must have been for him. He married and had five children. If it turns out that Haggard is, in fact, gay, he will have no need for hell. The self-loathing he has lived with is its own hell.
I am not excusing Haggard's deeds as leader of homophobic groups in Colorado and across the country. It will be interesting to see the group's reaction to their former leader: will they turn on him as the mob often does, or will they practice Christian forgiveness, hating the sin but loving the sinner? Will they send him off to be "re-educated," so that he may once again return to trying to mortify his flesh in the name of some despotic God's commandments in Leviticus?
Or, is there a possibility for Ted Haggard's redemption? Will this be his conversion experience? Will this be the moment that, his heart broken wide open by what is happening to him, that he learns to love the part of himself that he used to loathe? Will it cause him to ask forgiveness of the gay community, and to join the ranks of those of us who want all people to be able to love whom they choose to love? I think that's my wish for Ted Haggard. For him to know peace.
I can only love others as I love myself. And as I wish myself peace, I wish it for those who suffer. Maybe, if their suffering is eased, they will stop inflicting their pain onto us.

Your grief for what you've lost lifts a mirror
up to where you're bravely working.

Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
here's the joyful face you've been wanting to see.

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralyzed.

Your deepest presence is in every small
contracting and expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as birdwings.

Rumi Birdwings

Male Contraceptive Pill a Reality?

News out of Great Britain suggests that a male contraceptive pill is not too many years away from the market. The pill has been shown to not affect male hormone levels (thus not making them into girly girls), but it does prevent the manufacture of sperm.

In trials so far these have produced no worrying side effects - however scientists think men may still worry about whether introducing female hormones could harm their virility in some way.
The new approach would therefore avoid this problem. The common perception is that few women would actually believe a man who said he was on the Pill.
However a study published in the British Medical Journal in 2000 found that only two per cent of women said they would not trust their partner to take a male Pill.

I bet you can tell where this diary is going. Down.
If you are a woman, would you feel comfortable relying on your male partner to take care of contraception?
If you are a man, would you consider taking the pill in order to ensure not getting your partner pregnant? Would you worry about side effects? Would having your fertility affected make you feel less "manly"?
Given a man's choices about contraception previously: condoms, coitus interruptus, coitus reservatus, and vasectomy, this may be a welcome addition to the options.
Obviously, not everyone site has to worry about pregnancy. Those of us who are gay or sterile are out of this loop, but I would hope that even so, you may still have an opinion on the topic.
This diary is partly tongue-in-cheek. But I think that the reproductive rights debate may change in ways subtle and not-so-subtle if a male birth control method that had no permanent nor sensation side-effects were to become available.

High Heeled Sneakers

What Do Women Want?

by Kim Addonizio

I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what's underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty's and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I'm the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I'll pull that garment
from its hanger like I'm choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I'll wear it like bones, like skin,
it'll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.

Late Night Thoughts

I shouldn't be writing tonight. My neck hurts. My neck or arms or back almost always hurt, the result of a computer over-use injury that first popped up in 1996. It doesn't help to write long-hand. The nerves and wiring in me is fucked up, and when I get like this, I'm supposed to rest. Sometimes, I do that. I stop writing for a while. But for me, stopping writing is like stopping breathing. I begin to feel choked, overwhelmed, clogged up. I begin to drown in my own life, the pent-up sensations of taking the world in and then having nothing to "do" with that knowledge.

Outside, it is cold. It has sleeted much of the day. Sleet is ambivalent snow. Neither one nor the other, it just makes a mess. I wonder sometimes if my ambivalence creates the same affect in my own life. Neither here nor there, one nor the other. Happiness, when it comes, is not a long-term visitor, but when she arrives, I sometimes feel as if I overwhelm her, make too much of her being around. Perhaps if I gave her time to settle in, she wouldn't feel the need to leave so quickly. Sort of like the way I used to scare off lovers when I was younger. Sometimes, I just overwhelmed them with my need for their company, for their … love. And they would leave, hurriedly, sometimes cruelly.

Now, I spend a lot of time alone. My children split their time between their dad and me, and I no longer expect the men in my life to be permanent fixtures. I have learned, finally, to be alone, to like my own company, even on nights such as this when I am full of longing and wanderlust and not entirely sure of what it is that I want.

When I was younger, nights like this frightened me. The things I did to keep from having to be alone were myriad. I sought distraction, and that distraction took many forms. Men. Drugs. Bars. Television. Even books. That desire to get lost, to get totally fucked up and disoriented was strong, because if I didn't know where the hell I was then I didn't know where. I. was. To be aware of my true location, my true size, my real situation, was uncomfortable. I hate discomfort. Discomfort is dis-ease. That itchy, crawly sensation inside my own skin to be someone else, to be somewhere else, is god-awful. It makes me want to tear at my own flesh. I wish I could say that it has gone away. But it hasn't. What has changed is my ability to sit with it. To let it come into the room with me, see what it wants, see what it is trying to tell me.

A few years ago, shortly after I had left my marriage, at a moment when I felt completely adrift, I chanced upon Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. I do not remember how I found them, or why I felt compelled to buy a copy in the bookstore, but I did. I have a distinct memory of being sat in a coffeehouse in Seattle, and reading Letter #8 for the first time.

Have you ever had a moment when you have read something so true, so resonant with your own struggle, that you have vibrated upon reading it? It was as if someone had touched a gong within me.

The letter was written in August of 1904. It begins by discussing sadness as moments in which something enters into us, that, in fact, sadness is the reaction of our emotions to being confronted with something that whose meaning is not immediately apparent to us.

It continues:

And to speak of solitude again, it becomes always clear that this is at bottom not something that one can take or leave. We are solitary. We may delude ourselves and act as though this were not so. That is all. But how much better it is to realize that we are so, yes, even to begin by assuming it. We shall indeed turn dizzy then; for all points upon which our eye has been accustomed to rest are taken from us, there is nothing near any more and everything is infiintely far…So for him who becomes solitary all distances, all measures change; of these changes many take place suddenly, and then, as with the man on the mountaintop, extraordinary imaginings and singular sensations arise that seem to grow out beyond all bearing. But it is necessary for us to experience that too. We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible in it. That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm…For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed; it is shyness before any sort of new, unforseeable experience with which one does not think oneself ready to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most engimatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhastively from his own existence…We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us. We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of years of accomodation become so like this life, that when we hold still we are, through a happy mimicry, scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds us. We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must rry to love them.

Last week, alerted by caliberal that Eve Ensler had published a new book, I picked up a copy. Insecure at Last: Losing It In Our Security Obsessed World was not unlike reading Rilke the first time. Except for something important. The first time I read Rilke, which wasn't all that long ago, everything he said resonated, even if I felt I wasn't ready for the truth I was reading. I knew that I was suffering, but in reality, it was my fear of potential suffering that could still happen to me that was absolutely paralyzing. I did not think that I could bear one more moment of pain, that anything else that life had to throw at me would undo me. But Rilke opened something up in me that night. It made me aware that my fear would only lead me down the same paths I had already traversed. Those paths had led me to the place I was. All of my attempts to avoid suffering had simply created new ways for suffering to get in.

When I read Ensler last week, I found myself shaking my head in agreement. Not in the "aha" moment, but rather, in the recognition that fear has driven many, many people to forfeit their freedoms, to justify torture and war, to pledge allegiance to madmen, for that false sense of security. And in reading Ensler, and in being reminded of all that we have given up out of fear, made me want to … what?

At what point do people "get" that false security is allowing our fear of possible futures to pollute our right nows? There are worse things than the monsters. There is being paralyzed by fright, sitting in the cave watching shadows, afraid to go out into the sunlight. I feel as if I'm living in a nation of cave-dwellers. But I have hope, because I think that there are a lot more people venturing outside, braving their fears to really examine where our need for security has brought us. That is the "right now" that I see.

October Pond

Hidden Grave